Cork actress Fiona Shaw is putting women back in the Easter Rising story
IRISH women weren’t welcome when the time came to fight in 1916. Éamon de Valera refused to let them into Boland’s Mills, one of several rebel garrisons around Dublin city. He reckoned they wouldn’t have the stomach for fighting, unlike his men. His fellow rebel leader Ned Daly was of the same mind.
Catherine Byrne, however, was one of 200 women during the Easter Rising who weren’t for turning. She kicked in a window at the GPO on Dublin’s Sackville St, jumped through it and landed on top of another Irish Volunteer so she could get in on the action. Aoife de Búrca, a nurse featured in the RTÉ television documentary Seven Women, got a taxi to bring herself and her luggage into Dublin so she could do her bit.
